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5 Essential (Or Close To It) Photoshop Plugins

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Posted by Patrick on Dec 17, 2009 in Featured Content, Software

5 Essential (Or Close To It) Photoshop Plugins

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So you like to get creative in your workflow and you spend a lot of time in Photoshop? Well, I do to, perhaps too much time, but one thing I rely on quite a bit to speed up, enhance, or improve my time in Photoshop is its ability to be extended with third party plugins. Of course I’m certainly not unique in this regard, and with so many users and so many needs, there are seemingly hundreds of these plugins, some with very specific tasks, and some that multi-task. Some can do things Photoshop can’t, some do things better than Photoshop, and some just make things easier than Photoshop. Now I’ve collected quite a few of these over the years, but lately my needs have been honed quite a bit, and I find myself turning to 5 plugins on a regular basis

Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro

If you do black and white conversions, you need this plugin. Nik Software’s Silver Efex Pro works like magic to turn your images into amazing black and whites, and it’s practically effortless. They provide several presets for you to get started, but you’re welcome to come up with your own recipes. In addition to global adjustments, Silver Efex uses U Point technology to make selective adjustments, just drop a control point on an area you want to adjust, then increase or decrease the radius of the effect. You’re provided with various black and white film emulations, color filters, toning options, and vignette and burn options, and again all the choices you make can be saved as your own preset, that you can come back to again and again.

Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro 3.0

Nik Software’s Color Efex Pro is sort of like 52 filters in one. But right up front, half are basically junk, really I’m using just a handful of the filters, but I turn to them all the time. The white neutralizer is quite handy, film effects I’m constantly using, brilliance/warmth filter for landscapes, reflector effects are great, cross processing is fun, and I could go on just a bit . Like everything made by Nik, Color Efex is easy to use, a good many filters have control points to add or subtract the filter, or highlight/shadow sliders for protecting sensitive parts of your images. There are a couple of different versions, with more or less filters, so check out the free demo first to get a sense of what you like/need.

Nik Software’s Viveza

What Silver Efex Pro is to your black and white work, Viveza is to your color work. Viveza makes editing and enhancing your color images incredibly easy, again thanks in large part to U Point technology. Want to deepen that blue sky? Just drop a control point on it, increase the radius to fill the entire sky, then adjust the control point’s brightness slider to darker. It really is amazingly simple, almost too good to be true. Just this week Nik Software announced Viveza 2, and while we haven’t tried it yet, it seems to have added everything I was hoping for, like global adjustments and structure sliders to the control points. Another “must-have” in my opinion. Viveza 2 isn’t currently available, but Nik is offering free upgrades to folks who buy Viveza after Sept. 22.

Topaz Denoise

Photoshop is terrible at removing noise from images, or rather it’s great at removing noise, terrible at retaining detail. There are several plugins designed to bring improved noise removal results, and most of them are easily superior to Photoshop. For quite some time I’ve been a regular user of Picturecode’s Noise Ninja and I’ve been quite happy with the results (and speed). Recently though, I’ve been trying Topaz’s DeNOISE, which seems to provide even better results. With today’s camera abilities to shoot at higher ISO, users are lured into taking images where noise can get a tad excessive. DeNOISE is the best way to get rid of it.

Topaz’s website (free demo)

HDRsoft’s Photomatix

OK, it isn’t exactly a plugin (you can get the tone mapping feature as a plugin), but HDRsoft’s Photomatix is pretty indispensable for creating HDR images from multiple exposures. With much better results than Photoshop, Photomatix is pretty much the crowd favorite for HDR work. I use it to enhance dynamic range in a photo, then bring the results in as a layer. I use this layer in conjunction with masks to fix problem areas in my photos, as opposed to using the straight up HDR image. You’re free to use it how you want though, and with Photomatix’s versatile tone mapping you can go from subtle to surreal quite easily.

HDRsoft’s website

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